Professor Mark Sidel

Mark Sidel is Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has served for many years as consultant for Asia at the Washington-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), focusing on China, India and Vietnam, and joined the ICNL board of directors in June 2022. Since 2020 Sidel has also served as visiting professor of law at Cardozo Law School in New York.

Sidel is affiliated for research with Liverpool Law School, Charity Law and Policy Unit (as Honorary Professor in Law); the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) in New Delhi; the US-Asia Law Institute (USALI) at NYU Law School; and the Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management (CNSM) at City University of New York, Baruch College.

In 2016 and 2017 Sidel served as the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Visiting Chair in Community Philanthropy at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University; in spring 2018 as Ian Potter Foundation Fellow at the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies in Brisbane; and in February-March 2020 as visiting scholar at the University of Western Australia Law School in Perth.

In addition to his academic work, Sidel has served as president of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), the international academic association working to strengthen research on civil society, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector; on the Council on Foundations Community Foundations National Standards Board, the national accrediting and standard setting body for American community foundations and trusts; and on the boards of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), and other organizations.

Advising and consulting assignments have included SIDA/Indevelop (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, on human rights programs in China); the government of Denmark (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Danish development cooperation, on human rights and legal reform programs in Vietnam); the Ford Foundation (on legal reform programs in China); the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (on human rights and legal reform programming in China and Vietnam); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (on philanthropic law and policy in China); and many other international and donor organizations. Over the past several years Sidel has assisted a wide range of US and other organizations with issues under the Chinese Overseas NGO Law.

Professor Sidel has served as Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Melbourne Law School, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, in the chaire Asie), Brooklyn, Cardozo, Victoria, Vermont, Miami and Denver law schools and other institutions, and as W. G. Hart Lecturer in Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. In 2008 he won the ICNL-Cordaid Civil Liberties Prize for his work on the impact of anti-terrorism law on civil society in comparative perspective, and in 2012 he was named to the Outstanding Academic Award by the Nonprofit Organizations Committee of the American Bar Association, Business Law Section. He is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. in history), Yale University (M.A. in history), and Columbia Law School.

Professor Sidel has consulted or advised in a number of cases, including

• U.S. v. Stephen William Beal (weapon of mass destruction/death case, records largely sealed)
• U.S. v. Kil Soo Lee et al (the largest prosecution of slavery, human trafficking and involuntary servitude since the Civil War)
• Alliance for Open Society International v. US Agency for International Development (on funding restrictions to international affiliates of US nonprofit organizations)
• U.S. Summit Company LP v. Kenneth Phan et al (among the first forum non conveniens cases involving Vietnam)
• assisting the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency and other agencies in the matter of a deportation of a high-profile British citizen from Vietnam
• Denver Foundation v. Wells Fargo Bank (a significant case on the control of community foundations' trust principal); and other matters.

Sidel has frequently served and is frequently cited as an appointed expert for British firms and courts in human trafficking cases involving Vietnam (onanumberofoccasions), China, and the Philippines. He has also consulted with the U.S. State Department on human trafficking and labor law issues.